By IANS,
New Delhi : A landmark bill on reserving 33 percent of seats for women in parliament and the state legislatures is likely to come up for discussion in the budget session of parliament beginning late February, chairperson of a parliamentary panel on the measure said Thursday.
“A bill on reserving 33 percent of seats in parliament and the state assemblies is likely to be taken up in the next session of parliament,” Jayanthi Natarajan, chairperson of the Parliamentary Standing Committee on Personnel, Public Grievances, Law and Justice, told reporters.
“The bill should be presented in the form it was originally tabled in the Rajya Sabha (in May 2008),” she said after presenting the committee’s report to the Rajya Sabha.
In this context, she referred to two demands made by two Samajwadi Party (SP) members on pegging the reservations at 20 percent and for a quota within this for women from the other backward classes and the minorities as had been provided for women from the Scheduled Castes and the Scheduled Tribes, saying these had been rejected.
Holding that 33 percent reservation of seats for women was a “valid and necessary strategy” to enhance their participation in the decision making process, the standing committee hoped that the measure would be passed into law “and put into action without further delay”.
The committee “is of the unanimous opinion that reservation of seats for women is a valid and necessary strategy to enhance women’s participation in the decision/policy making process,” it said in its report.
“It feels that representation of women in the policy making process is critical to the nation building process,” the committee said, adding that a bill effecting the reservations would be a “crucial affirmative step in the right direction of enhancing the participation of women in the state legislatures and parliament and increasing the role of women in the democratization of the country”.
Lamenting that the “much required” reservation “has not reached 50 percent of the population, namely women”, the committee “strongly” felt that “further time should not be wasted rather the Women’s Reservation Bill should be passed in parliament and put into action without further delay”.
There were vociferous protests by Samajwadi Party (SP), Janata Dal-United (JD-U) and the Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD) members as Shahnawaz Hussain (Bharatiya Janata Party) tabled the report in the Lok Sabha. However, Natarajan faced minor protests, more in the nature of a formality, when she tabled the report in the Rajya Sabha.
Noting that there was “no adequate representation of women in the social, economic and political life of the country even after more than 60 years of independence”, the committee said “meaningful empowerment of women can be achieved only with adequate participation by women in legislative bodies or the parliamentary machinery” as “inadequate” representation of women in these bodies “is a primary factor” behind the general backwardness of women at all levels.
In this context, the committee noted that 33 percent reservation for women in panchayats – since raised to 50 percent – has “had the desired effect on the empowerment of women”.
Commenting on the 15-year period prescribed in the bill for women’s reservations, the committee felt the government “may consider this proposal as and when the need arises.
“Reservation is certainly needed to enable women to cross the socio-gender hurdles and to give them a level playing ground/equal opportunities as their male counterparts. Once this ‘equalisation’ process is done and ‘adequate’ political representation of women is achieved, then the time prescribed for reservations may be reconsidered,” the committee noted.